Capital of the United States on the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland and coextensive with the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on the July 16, 1790.



It was designed by the Pierre L'Enfant and became the capital in the 1800. War of 1812 the British captured and sacked 1814 Washington, burning most of the public buildings, including the Capitol and the White House. Population of Washington is 588,000. Washington city is located on the north bank of the Potomac River and is bordered by the states of Virginia to the southwest and Maryland to the other sides.

Design for the City of Washington was largely the work of Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French-born architect engineer and city planner who first arrived in the colonies as a military engineer with Major General Lafayette during the American Revolutionary War. In the 1791, President Washington commissioned L'Enfant to plan the layout of new capital city.
District is divided into the four quadrants of unequal area Northwest, Northeast, Southeast and the Southwest. The axes bounding quadrants radiate from the U.S. Capitol building. All road names include the quadrant abbreviation to indicate the their location. Most of the city, the streets are set out in a grid pattern with the east west streets named with letters and the north south streets with the numbers. Avenues radiating from the traffic circles are primarily named after the states, all the 50 states are represented, as well as the Puerto Rico and the District itself. Some Washington streets are particularly noteworthy, such as the Pennsylvania Avenue, which connects the White House with the U.S. Capitol and K Street which houses the offices of many lobbying groups.

In the District of Columbia there are many private art museums in the District of Columbia, which house major collections and exhibits open to the public such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, largest private museum in Washington and the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle, the first museum of modern art in the United States. Other private museums in Washington include the Newseum, the International Spy Museum, the National Geographic Society museum and the Marian Koshland Science Museum.



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